Bones: The Party in the Pants

This week on Magic Mike — err… Bones – we get a fun little surprise. Our victim, Jack Spindler the successful stock broker, moonlights as a stripper. Because that’s what wealthy stock brokers do in life, right? Needless to say, the list of suspects piles up, and my personal favorite suspect is “Storm”… ugh stripper names, am I right? In another surprise, we meet Booth’s mother! This has been the season of estranged and/or dead mothers coming back to life and/or back into the picture apparently. Since she’s been out of his life for twenty-four years, you can bet this comes as a shock to our lovably grumpy FBI agent. What does she want from him now and does he even want her in his life? It’s an interesting turn of events to be sure.

Initially, it seemed liked Booth’s reaction to his mother was a bit off. He embraced her right from the start, not knowing where she had been or what she had been doing all those years. But my opinion sort of changed during the course of the episode. What I thought was a disingenuous reaction was just Booth protecting himself. We see this unfamiliar, vulnerable side of Booth where he wants to believe the best of his mother, and it’s actually pretty endearing. But even though he wants to see the good side of things, we do realize later that he has some underlying anger towards her when she reveals she’s getting married and has been a mother to her fiancés two children; that anger added a dose of reality to the situation. We also find out a little something about Booth’s past which sheds a different light on this character. Booth’s father was abusive and his mother felt that the only way out was to leave him and the children. Apparently his father’s violent nature has taken more of a toll on Booth than we thought. Booth feels that he has gravitated towards violence in his life; his job deals with death on a daily basis. The scene where he reveals this insecurity is a poignant one with Brennan reassuring him that he does everything in his power to combat the dark things of the world, and not pursue them. It’s just another example of these two vastly different characters complimenting each other in their contrast. She is always able to bring him down from some emotional spiral with her rational and he is there to soften her rough edges.

Back on the case we find out that it was indeed Stormy who murdered Jack, though not over stealing stripping gigs from each other. Stormy had given Jack all the money he had in the world, five thousand dollars, to invest in a “sure bet.” That sure bet was actually an illegal financial scheme known as a “pump and dump”… um, okay I think we could have thought of a better name than that, Wall Street. Speaking of stock brokers, one very interesting juxtaposition presented in this episode is the world of stripping with the world of Wall Street. I don’t know which profession they made seem seedier; actually I do. Even though the stripper was the murderer, somehow the money sharks came our looking sleazier. What kind of Jedi mind trick is this, writers?

On a lighter note, I’ve noticed something incredible about this show… Angela and Camille are literally always dressed for a cocktail party. Like, they will drag a charred body out of fire barrel at 9:00 a.m. and be in Oscar de la Renta’s Fall 2013 runway collection by noon. I can appreciate this. I mean if you’re piecing bones together and pulling calve implants (which are apparently a thing?) out of stripper’s legs all day, might as well look good doing it. More power to you, ladies.